paleshadows writes: Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and software-as-a-service (SaaS) enable organizations to rent cloud resources required to perform specific tasks, thus reducing operational and support costs. According to researchers at the Technion — Israel Institute of Technology, the cloud market is about to give birth to a new and more efficient cloud platform. In a position paper presented at USENIX HotCloud '12 in Boston, researchers Orna Agmon Ben-Yehuda, Muli Ben-Yehuda, Assaf Schuster, and Dan Tsafrir postulate that IaaS is on the path to evolving into a more practical model, one that enables customers to purchase individual resources for a few seconds at a time. The researchers have dubbed this new cloud platform "resource-as-a-service" (RaaS). RaaS would enable businesses to have more control over what resources to allocate towards a virtual machine. "Renting a fixed combination of cloud resources cannot and does not reflect the interests of clients," states the paper.Link to Original Source